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How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts

In the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, industrialist Barre Seid funded a new group run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks and helped end federal abortion rights.



An elderly, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history — worth $1.6 billion — and the recipient is one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court.

Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.

The donation was first reported by The New York Times on Monday. The Lever and ProPublica confirmed the information from documents received independently by the news organizations.

Our reporting sheds additional light on how the two men, one a judicial kingmaker and the other a mysterious but prolific donor to conservative causes, came together to create a political war chest that will likely supercharge efforts to further shift American politics to the right.

As President Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, Leo helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which recently eliminated Constitutional protections for abortion rights and has made a series of sweeping pro-business decisions. Leo, a conservative Catholic, has both helped select judges to nominate to the Supreme Court and directed multimillion dollar media campaigns to confirm them.

Leo derives immense political power through his ability to raise huge sums of money and distribute those funds throughout the conservative movement to influence elections, judicial appointments and policy battles. Yet the biggest funders of Leo’s operation have long been a mystery.

Seid, who led the surge protector and data-center equipment maker Tripp Lite for more than half a century, has been almost unknown outside a small circle of political and cultural recipients. The gift immediately vaults him into the ranks of major funders like the Koch brothers and George Soros.

In practical terms, there are few limitations on how Leo’s new group, the Marble Freedom Trust, can spend the enormous donation. The structure of the donation allowed Seid to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. Thus, he maximized the amount of money at Leo’s disposal.

Now, Leo, 56, is positioned to finance his already sprawling network with one of the largest pools of political capital in American history. Seid has left his legacy to Leo.

“To my knowledge, it is entirely without precedent for a political operative to be given control of such an astonishing amount of money,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented. “Leonard Leo is already incredibly powerful, and now he is going to have over a billion dollars at his disposal to continue upending our country’s institutions.”

In a statement to the Times, Leo said it was “high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.” Leo and representatives for Seid did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Marble Freedom Trust is a so-called dark money group that is not required to publicly disclose its donors. It has wide latitude to spend directly on elections as well as on ideological projects such as funding issue-advocacy groups, think tanks, universities, religious institutions and organizing efforts.



The creators of the Marble Freedom Trust shrouded their project in secrecy for more than two years.

The group’s name does not appear in any public database of business, tax or securities records. The Marble Freedom Trust is organized for legal purposes as a trust, rather than as a corporation. That means it did not have to publicly disclose basic details like its name, directors and address.

The trust was formed in Utah. Its address is a house in North Salt Lake owned by Tyler Green, a lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Green is listed in the trust’s tax return as an administrative trustee. The donation does not appear to violate any laws.

Seid’s $1.6 billion donation is a landmark in the era of deregulated political spending ushered in by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. That case, along with subsequent changes and weak federal oversight, empowered a tiny group of the super rich in both parties to fund groups that can spend unlimited sums to support candidates and political causes. In the last decade, donations in the millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars have become common.

Individuals could give unlimited amounts of money to nonprofit groups prior to Citizens United, but the decision allowed those nonprofits to more directly influence elections. A handful of billionaires such as the Koch family and Soros have spent billions to achieve epochal political influence by bankrolling networks of nonprofits.

Even in this money-drenched world, Seid’s $1.6 billion gift exceeds all publicly known one-time donations to a politically oriented group.


The Silent Donor


One day in November 2015, the employees of Tripp Lite, a manufacturer of power strips and other electrical equipment, gathered for a celebration at the company’s headquarters on the South Side of Chicago. Cupcakes frosted in blue and white spelled out the numbers “56.” An easel held up a sign hailing Tripp Lite’s longtime leader: “Congratulations Barre!”

A small, balding man with a white goatee and a ruddy complexion took the microphone. Barre Seid was known as someone who preferred to keep a low profile, but on the 56th anniversary of his leadership of Tripp Lite, he couldn’t resist the chance to address his employees. Later, as he bit into a cupcake, Seid posed for a company photographer, who later uploaded the photo to the company’s Facebook page.

Even this semipublic glimpse of Seid was rare.

For several decades, a select group of political activists, academics and fundraisers was ushered to Tripp Lite headquarters to pitch Seid at his office. Despite his status as one of the country’s most prolific funders of conservative causes, and despite his decades as the president and sole owner of one of the country’s most successful electronics makers, Seid has spent most of his 90 years painstakingly guarding his privacy.

There are no art galleries, opera companies, or theaters or university buildings emblazoned with his name in his hometown of Chicago. There’s even some confusion over how to pronounce his last name. (People who’ve dealt with him say it’s “side.”)

The Lever and ProPublica pieced together the details of his life and his motivations for his extensive donations through interviews, court records and other documents obtained through public-records requests.

One of the only photos of Seid that The Lever and ProPublica could find shows him as a 14-year-old walking in a small group across a college campus. Born in 1932 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Seid grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the oldest of two brothers, according to Census records. A precocious child, he was chosen for a special bachelor’s degree program at the University of Chicago, not far from his childhood home.

Seid attended the University of Chicago in the early years of the “Chicago school,” a group of professors and researchers who would reimagine the field of economics, assailing massive government interventions in the economy and emphasizing the importance of human liberty and free markets. After college, Seid served two years in the Army and eventually returned home to Chicago, according to testimony given decades later in a court case. He took a job as an assistant to an investor and businessman named Graham Trippe, whose company made headlights and would produce the rotating warning lights used by police cars, tow trucks and other emergency response vehicles.

By the mid-1960s, Seid had taken over as Trippe Manufacturing’s president. In the decades to come, the company, now called Tripp Lite, became a pick-and-shovel business of the digital gold rush. The company sells the power strips that supply electricity to computers and the server racks, cooling equipment and network switches that make data centers run. Business surged with the shift to cloud computing and the proliferation of vast data centers.

That boom vaulted him from the ranks of merely rich to the superrich. Seid was making around $30 million per year by the mid-1990s, tax records obtained by ProPublica show. His annual income, the vast majority of which came from Tripp Lite’s profits, took off in the mid-2000s and steadily rose, hitting around $157 million in 2018. Tripp Lite, which was 100% owned by Seid, contributed $136 million to his total income that year.

Even as Seid built a billion-plus dollar business, he drew scant public attention; Forbes never put him on its list of the wealthiest Americans, and business and political press rarely mentioned him.

Yet he was becoming a major donor. He gave at least $775 million in charitable donations between 1996 and 2018, a period in which he reported $1.7 billion in income, according to his tax records. Seid parceled out a small portion of those donations to Chicago-area universities, religious organizations, medical research and dozens of civic-focused groups.

While Seid has never spoken to the press about his ideology, evidence of his worldview has emerged here and there. His family foundation has supported the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, named after two of the Chicago school’s intellectual leaders, Gary Becker and Milton Friedman. He has also donated to the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit that has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric and misleading tactics to undermine climate science.

Seid appeared to be the donor (listed as “Barry Seid”) who gave $17 million to fund the distribution during the 2008 presidential campaign of millions of copies of a DVD of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West.” The DVDs, which were sent specifically to households in presidential election battleground states, were criticized as virulently anti-Muslim.

Seid’s personality can be glimpsed in exchanges with George Mason University officials from the late 2000s to mid-2010s that came out in response to a public-records request by the activist group UnKoch My Campus. In the emails, Seid comes across as an intellectually probing figure, asking the dean of the law school to respond to news stories about the value of a law-school degree or the workings of higher education’s accreditation system. Seid drily addressed several administrators for the university, whose law school and economics department are known for their alignment with conservative, free-market principles, as “Fellow Members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.”

Seid appears to have continually sought new vehicles for dispensing his money and maintaining as much anonymity as possible. The GMU emails also show a redacted donor — who activists believed to be Seid based on other unredacted materials — routing donations to the school through DonorsTrust or the Donors Capital Fund, two donor-advised funds that provide an additional level of anonymity.

While the roots of Seid and Leo’s professional relationship aren’t clear, the two worked together at a small foundation Seid formed in 2009 called the Chicago Freedom Trust, a charity that gave out small grants to nonpolitical groups. Leo later joined the foundation’s board.

The GMU emails provide an inkling of the relationship between the two men. In early 2016, Seid emailed the dean of GMU’s law school and the head of a prominent American Jewish organization to urge them to work together. The dean, Henry Butler, forwarded Seid’s message to Leo seeking to better understand Seid’s intentions.

“Do you have any insight?” Butler wrote.

“I do not, but will find out,” Leo replied.


The Money

Billionaires tend to craft intricate estate plans to pass the family business to the next generation, fortified from taxation and protective of their vision. The apparently childless Seid didn’t have that option, but starting in April 2020, he set in motion a plan to make sure his fortune would go toward his favored causes.

That month, the Marble Freedom Trust was created, and Seid subsequently transferred his 100% ownership stake in Tripp Lite to the trust, according to the documents reviewed by The Lever and ProPublica.

In February 2021, Tripp Lite filed its annual reports with the state of Illinois as it had done for decades. But this time, Seid’s typewritten name had been crossed out as an officer of the company. Added as an officer, written in by hand, was Leonard Leo.

A Tripp Lite subsidiary in Nova Scotia, Canada, similarly removed Seid as a director and added Leo as a director in March 2021, according to disclosure filings.

Then, later that same month, Eaton Corporation, a large publicly traded company, acquired Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion.

The transactions appear to have been carefully sequenced to reap massive tax savings. Selling a company that has grown in value after decades of ownership is treated the same way for tax purposes as a person selling a share of stock. If the property has grown in value, capital gains taxes are due when it is sold.

But Seid transferred Tripp Lite to the Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit that is exempt from income tax, before the electronics company was sold. As a result, lawyers say, Seid avoided up to $400 million in state and federal income tax, preserving those funds for Leo’s operation.

“If the person who had owned the stock had sold the stock himself, he would’ve been taxed on the appreciation in the stock,” said Ellen Aprill, a tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University. “Whereas if you give it to the 501(c)(4), there’s no charitable deduction for giving the money, but you avoid the tax on all of that appreciation.”

Political advocacy nonprofits like the Marble Freedom Trust are formally called 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, after the section of the tax code. Informally, they are known as dark-money groups because donors can remain secret, in contrast to the public disclosures required of gifts to political campaigns or super PACs. While they can spend money directly advocating for or against candidates in political campaigns, such spending cannot be their primary purpose.

In giving to such a dark money group, Seid also avoided another federal levy, the gift tax, thanks to a change signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015.

There’s a reason why giving money specifically to a trust might have been attractive for an older and ideological donor such as Seid. The founding documents that lay out how the trust will spend money can be harder to change than the governing documents of a corporation, according to Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

Mayer added that while corporations usually have at least three directors, trusts can have just a single trustee in charge of the organization’s activities.

Leo is the trustee and chairman of the Marble Freedom Trust. In other words, Leo is now in charge of the massive sum of money.


The Rainmaker

For decades, Leo had served as a top executive at the Federalist Society, helping lead the influential Washington-based conservative lawyers group that serves as a launching pad for careers on the right.

But in early 2020, Leo made an announcement that suggested he was taking his successful model for reshaping the courts to remake American politics at every level: local, state and federal. In an interview with Axios, Leo said he was stepping away from his day-to-day role with the Federalist Society to take a more active role steering a network of conservative dark money groups.

The plan was to expand the network’s scope to “funnel tens of millions of dollars into conservative fights around the country,” according to Axios. What Leo did not mention in the interview was the imminent creation of the Marble Freedom Trust, his biggest-ever war chest.

Leo’s long career as both a legal activist and a prodigious fundraiser for conservative causes shows a steady march toward becoming a central figure in the Republican Party’s successful strategy to fill as many judicial vacancies as possible with young, conservative judges skeptical of the federal government’s power. He served as an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, helping the candidate take a step no other major presidential candidate had ever taken: releasing a list of names he would draw on to nominate to the Supreme Court.

Coming at a moment when conservatives were wary of Trump’s past leanings, the move bolstered his support among social conservatives. Leo stayed on as a judicial adviser during Trump’s four years in office. During that time, Leo helped the president appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Leo’s efforts to reshape the country’s judicial system began long before Trump’s political ascent. In 1991, he joined the Federalist Society, which was then in its early years and only beginning to build a pipeline for conservative jurists.

In the view of Leo and his allies, the U.S. legal system had drifted dangerously far from its roots, establishing privileged classes and doctrines that were not enumerated in the Constitution and would be unrecognizable to the Founders. Those same courts had also empowered a class of unelected bureaucrats dubbed the “administrative state” to impose needless regulations and to endow the federal government with too much power. Like his close friend Justice Antonin Scalia, Leo argued for an originalist view of the Constitution — namely, that the country’s founding document should be interpreted strictly based on how its 18th century authors understood its words at the time.

In 2005, Leo and his allies formed a dark money network to rally support for George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But if Leo wanted to turn back the tide of what he saw as unchecked judicial activism, he needed to build something bigger, more lasting.

Leo set out to create a network of interlocking groups that could each play a part in returning the country to what he saw as its roots, whether by training future generations of Scalias, funding scholarship that made the case for originalism or bankrolling efforts to install conservative judges on the bench.

Between 2005 and mid-2021, Leo and his associates raised at least $460 million (not including the Marble Freedom Trust’s funds).

According to tax records, Leo’s network has funneled those hundreds of millions into ad campaigns and right-leaning groups. The Judicial Crisis Network — which is now called the Concord Fund and is headed by a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and Leo associate named Carrie Severino — has spent tens of millions airing ads during Supreme Court confirmation fights.

The group’s fundraising took off in 2016, when it led a campaign to block Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s confirmation. That year, Leo’s network received a $28 million infusion from a single anonymous donor. Leo and his network long refused to say who is paying for their advocacy campaigns.

Leo’s network has worked closely with Senate Republicans and has showered them with cash as well, recently donating $9 million to a dark money group affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

While Leo is best known for his influence on the Supreme Court, he and his network have also worked to shift the balance of power throughout the judiciary — in federal district and appellate courts, and state supreme courts, too.

At the state level, the network funds groups supporting conservative gubernatorial and legislative candidates. Leo’s nonprofits and their subsidiaries have recently pushed states to tighten voting laws, opposed the teaching of critical race theory in schools and financed organizations pressing states to remove millions of Americans from the Medicaid rolls.

But now, with Seid’s largesse, Leo has nearly four times the amount he raised over 16 years at his disposal and ambitions to match.

“I have a very simple rule, which is, I’m engaged in the battle of ideas, and I care very deeply about our Constitution and the role of courts in our society,” Leo told The Washington Post in 2019 when asked about his donors. “And I don’t waste my time on stories that involve money and politics because what I care about is ideas.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-leonard-leo-barre-seid


Himmler

Cool. It's about time we did what communists like Sorros have done for a long time.

I think you're adding to his overall point. Two wrongs don't make a right.

OH BS... The Koch Brothers have been doing it for years.. Don't give me that crap about "it's about time we did what the other side has been doing" The right has been taking money for years like this.

But three lefts do

Shhhhh! No one on the left is involved in "dark money". Only conservative politicians are corrupt... and here's yet another thread to prove it!

Get with the program!

literally no one is saying that. we have acknowledge plenty of times the corrupt funding coming from establishment dems.

republicans are the ones who are extremely loud about it. yall the equivalent of rappers who self-snitch about crimes on their own songs. Feds just sitting there laughing writing everything down.

How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards

https://www.yahoo.com/news/far-christian-cellphone-company-took-120040645.html

again, not very subtle about it. and i'm not saying it's illegal or should be.

but this is 'dark' money out in the open from conservatives. the definition doesn't really change though just because they aren't hiding it anymore.

The Supremes' "Citizen's United" ruling opened the flood gates.
Fat chance this 6/3 court would reverse is any time soon.

Yep yep.

That's why I'm rollin' with a "Free Ra Diggs" sticker on the back of my Range Rover.

Nobody was saying it, but the implication was there. The thread was an innocuously enough non-partisan title, but then the contents were solely focused on pointing fingers one way. In no way at all is that NOT saying it. It's saying it without mentioning it.

So, let's have it folks... dump all of it, from both sides.

Clinton Foundation donations for "Pay to Play", anyone?
How about Obama's Green Energy choices all happened to be his largest campaign donors?
Kock Brothers?
Sorros & Satan?


What they say is true: We have the best government money can buy.

And that's why many of us say that neither party really represents us and all we are left with is choosing the lesser of two evils.

thats fair.

to add to all that, i haven't heard a conservative explain how they're cool with Kushner and the saudi deals during the trump administration.

It was only two billion dollars. What's the big deal?

How a far-right, Christian cellphone company ‘took over’ four Texas school boards

Patriot Mobile markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider.” Now the Trump-aligned company is on a mission to win control of Texas school boards.


Karl Meek went to a Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees meeting Monday wearing a T-shirt with the district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD” to protest the political action committee’s influence over the school system.

DALLAS — A little more than a year after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared that conservatives needed to win seats on local school boards to “save the nation,” he used his conspiracy theory-fueled TV program to spotlight Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that had answered his call to action.

“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”

Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”

“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

It was a moment of celebration for an upstart company whose leaders say they are on a mission from God to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government — especially in public schools. To carry out that calling, the Grapevine-based company this year created a political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action, and gave it more than $600,000 to spend on nonpartisan school board races in the Fort Worth suburbs.

This spring, the PAC blanketed the communities of Southlake, Keller, Grapevine and Mansfield with thousands of political mailers warning that sitting school board members were endangering students with critical race theory and other “woke” ideologies. Patriot Mobile presented its candidates as patriots who would “keep political agendas out of the classroom.”

ct to abruptly pull more than 40 previously challenged library books off shelves for further review, including a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” as well as several LGBTQ-themed novels.

In the neighboring city of Southlake, Patriot Mobile donated framed posters that read “In God We Trust” to the Carroll Independent School District during a special presentation before the school board. Under a new Texas law, the district is now required to display the posters prominently in each of its school buildings. Afterward, Patriot Mobile celebrated the donation in a blog post titled “Putting God Back Into Our Schools.”

And this week at a tense, eight-hour school board meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District’s board of trustees voted 4-3 to implement a far-reaching set of policies that restrict how teachers can discuss race and gender. The new policies also limit the rights of transgender and nonbinary students to use bathrooms and pronouns that correspond with their genders. And the board made it easier for parents to ban library books dealing with sexuality.

To protest the changes, some parents came to the meeting wearing T-shirts with the school district’s name, GCISD, crossed out and replaced with the words “Patriot Mobile Action ISD.”

“They bought four school boards, and now they’re pulling the strings,” said Rachel Wall, the mother of a Grapevine-Colleyville student and vice president of the Texas Bipartisan Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting school board candidates who do not have partisan agendas. “I’m a Christian by faith, but if I wanted my son to be in a religious school, I would pay for him to go to a private school.”

Patriot Mobile officials didn’t respond to messages requesting comment. Leigh Wambsganss, executive director of Patriot Mobile Action and vice president of government and media affairs at Patriot Mobile, declined to speak with a reporter at CPAC, saying she did not trust NBC News to accurately report on the company’s political activism. In a social media post days later, she called the journalist’s interview request harassment, adding, “I don’t interview with reporters I don’t trust.”

In recent interviews with conservative media outlets, Wambsganss has said that Patriot Mobile’s goal is to install school board members who will oppose the teaching of “LGBTQ ideologies,” fight to remove “pornographic books,” and stand against school anti-racism initiatives, which she and her supporters have argued indoctrinate children with anti-white and anti-American views.

“You know, the sad thing is there is real racism, and that is really a terrible thing,” Wambsganss said in a June appearance on the Mark Davis Show, a conservative talk radio program that broadcasts in the Dallas region. “But they’re watering down and devaluing that word so bad that it’s become meaningless.”

In that same interview, Wambsganss made clear that Patriot Mobile views its political activism as a religious calling — and that the group’s electoral success this spring was just the beginning.

“We’re not here on this earth to please man — we’re here to please God,” Wambsganss said, adding later in the interview, “Ultimately we want to expand to other counties, other states and be in every state across the nation.”

‘Make America Christian Again’

Founded about a decade ago, Patriot Mobile markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” which includes a pledge to donate a portion of users’ monthly bills to conservative causes.

Initially, Patriot Mobile’s founders said their goal was to support groups and politicians who promised to oppose abortion, defend religious freedom, protect gun rights and support the military.

After the 2016 presidential election, the company’s branding shifted further to the right and embraced Trump’s style of politics. One of Patriot Mobile’s most famous advertisements includes the slogan “Making Wireless Great Again,” alongside an image of Trump’s face photoshopped onto a tanned, muscled body holding a machine gun.

That approach has drawn the support of some big names on the right.

“You can give your money to AT&T, the parent company of CNN, and you can pay the salary of Don Lemon, or you can support someone like a Patriot Mobile and give back to causes that they believe in,” Donald Trump Jr. said from the stage at a CPAC gathering in February. “That’s not cancel culture, folks. That’s using your damn brain.”

Patriot Mobile has also aligned itself in recent years with political and religious leaders who promote a once-fringe strand of Christian theology that experts say has grown more popular on the right in recent years. Dominionism, sometimes referred to as the Seven Mountains Mandate, is the belief that Christians are called on to dominate the seven key “mountains” of American life, including business, media, government and education.

John Fea, a professor of American history at the private, Christian Messiah University in Pennsylvania, has spent years studying Seven Mountains theology. Fea said the idea that Christians are called on to assert biblical values across all aspects of American society has been around for decades on the right, but “largely on the fringe.”

Trump’s election changed that.

“It fits very well with the ‘Make America Great Again’ mantra,” Fea said. “‘Make America Great Again’ to them means, ‘Make America Christian Again,’ restore America to its Christian roots.”

Patriot Mobile appears to have embraced that shift, Fea said.

Beginning a year ago, one of the leading proponents of the Seven Mountains worldview, Rafael Cruz, a pastor, began leading weekly Bible studies for employees at Patriot Mobile’s corporate office, which the company films and posts on YouTube.

In a recent Patriot Mobile sermon, Cruz — the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — dismissed the concept of separation of church and state as a myth, arguing that America’s founders meant that ideal as a “one-way wall” preventing the government from interfering with the church, not preventing the church from influencing the government.

He then called on people who “are rooted in the righteousness of the word of God” to run for public office.

“If those people are not running for office, if they are not even voting, then what’s left?” Cruz said. “The wicked electing the wicked.”

Cruz didn’t respond to a message requesting an interview.

Beginning last year, after opposition to “critical race theory” emerged as a political attack on the right, Fea said he began to observe another shift in the Christian Dominionism movement.

Rather than focusing primarily on winning federal elections, these groups started talking about the need to take control of public schools — “the ideal battleground,” Fea said, “if you’re looking to fight this battle.”

“This is a spiritual war, they believe, against demonic forces that undermine a godly nation by teaching kids in school that America is not great, America is not a city on the hill or that America has flaws,” Fea said. “If you can get in and teach the right side of history, and social studies and civics lessons about what America is, you can win the next generation and save America for Christ.”

‘Saving our public schools’

Patriot Mobile’s unconventional business strategy appears to be paying off.

Without providing specific numbers, the company said it doubled its subscriber base in 2021, and as a result, it planned to give more than $1.5 million to conservative causes in 2022, triple the amount from the year prior.

In January, the company filed documents to establish Patriot Mobile Action and brought on Wambsganss to lead it — a strong signal that the company was planning to get involved in school board politics.

Wambsganss, a long-time political activist, had earned national acclaim among conservatives in 2021 for her work as one of the co-founders of Southlake Families PAC, another group that promotes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” When the Carroll school system in Southlake unveiled a diversity plan to crack down on racism and anti-LGBTQ bullying in the majority white school district, Southlake Families, under Wambsganss’ leadership, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a slate of school board candidates who promised to kill the plan.

After winning every race by a landslide, the PAC’s success was celebrated on Fox News and in The Wall Street Journal, prompting former Texas GOP Chairman Allan West to urge Southlake Families leaders to “export this to every single major suburban area in the United States of America.”

At the helm of the newly established Patriot Mobile Action, Wambsganss got to work achieving that goal this spring, starting first with some suburban school systems close to home.

In interviews with conservative outlets, Wambsganss has said she and her team zeroed in on four North Texas independent school districts — Keller, Grapevine-Colleyville, Mansfield and Carroll — that had implemented or considered policies dealing with race, sexuality and gender that she and other Christian conservatives found objectionable.

After interviewing candidates in each district, Patriot Mobile Action settled on a slate of 11 who pledged to support conservative causes. Following the playbook from Southlake, the PAC hired a pair of heavy-hitter GOP consulting firms that had worked on campaigns for Ted Cruz and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — bringing sophisticated national-level political strategies to local school board races.

Patriot Mobile paid Vanguard Field Strategies nearly $150,000 to run get-out-the-vote canvassing operations across the four school districts, according to financial disclosures. The PAC paid another $240,000 to Axiom Strategies to produce and send tens of thousands of political mailers to homes across North Texas.

One flyer sent to Mansfield residents baselessly blamed a recent classroom shooting at a local high school on critical race theory-inspired disciplinary policies and accused the district of putting “woke” politics ahead of the safety of children.

A Patriot Mobile mailer sent in Grapevine and Colleyville endorsed two board candidates who the PAC said would oppose critical race theory, an academic study of systemic racism that, according to the flyer, “violates everything patriots believe in.”

And Patriot Mobile sent flyers endorsing three candidates in Keller under the slogan, “Saving America starts with saving our public schools.”

After all of Patriot Mobile’s candidates won, the company celebrated the victories in a blog post that also included a justification for its decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on nonpartisan local elections.

“While the media today wishes to demonize conservative activism in local races, the truth is that liberal activists have been pouring countless dollars into local politics for many years,” the post said, citing past school board candidate donations from a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for equity in education, as well as one $35,000 donation to a candidate in the Dallas suburbs from a Democratic political action committee in 2021. “Conservative activism at the local level is long overdue.”

At CPAC in August, Bannon asked Wambsganss and Story on his “War Room” TV show whether they had started to see changes in the four school districts.

“Oh, tremendous,” Wambsganss said. “Those 11 seats in four ISDs means that now North Texas has over 100,000 students who, before May, had leftist leadership. Now they have conservative leadership.”

Bannon replied, “Amen.”

‘This is not love’

On Monday night, North Texas residents got a front-row seat for what it looks like when Patriot Mobile takes over a school board.

Just 72-hours before the meeting, the Grapevine-Colleyville school district had unveiled a sweeping 36-page policy touching on virtually every aspect of the culture wars over race, gender and sexuality that have dominated school politics since last year.

Under the policy, teachers are prohibited from discussing any concepts related to or inspired by critical race theory or what the policy refers to as “systemic discrimination ideologies.” The policy gives school employees the right to refer to trans and nonbinary students by pronouns and names matching the ones they were assigned at birth — a practice known as misgendering or deadnaming — even if the student’s parents support their child’s gender expression. And the policy prohibits any reading materials and classroom discussions dealing with “gender fluidity,” which the document defines as any belief that “espouses the view that biological sex is merely a social construct.”

Tammy Nakamura, one of the board members backed by Patriot Mobile, said the board’s 4-3 vote to adopt the policy fulfilled her campaign promise “to put an end to adults pushing their worldviews, whims and fantasies onto unsuspecting children.”

Although some members of the board majority and their supporters argued that the policy merely brought the district in line with state and federal laws, Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the plan goes well beyond the state’s anti-CRT law and appears to be in violation of federal civil rights statutes that protect students from discrimination on the basis of their gender and sexuality.

“This is the most extreme board policy that we have seen related to classroom censorship,” Huddleston said.

Debate over the policy turned Monday’s school board meeting into a political circus.

The Patriot Mobile-aligned True Texas Project, which has been labeled as an anti-government extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, called on its supporters to pack the meeting and turn it into a party celebrating the new policy. The group set up tents hours beforehand and tailgated in the parking lot, along with an anti-trans activist group whose leader was suspended from Twitter this year after she wrote, “Let’s start rounding up people who participate in pride events,” referring to LGBTQ rights celebrations.

Nearly 200 people signed up to speak during public comments prior to the board vote.

One man who spoke in support of the new policy urged the board majority to “fight like hell” and “hold the ground against the LGBT mafia and their dang pedo fans” — echoing false claims by some Christian conservatives in recent months that queer educators have been trying to sexually groom children.

“And guess what,” the man shouted into the microphone, “teachers shouldn’t be forced to use your freakin’ made up fantasy pronouns!”

Another resident who spoke in support of the policy said one of the things that made America great was “schools that taught kids to read and know the Bible, and recite the Constitution.” She commended the school board for working to restore those ideals.

“Our kids have to be taught our foundation,” she said. “Our foundation of God-given inalienable rights, religious freedoms, individualism, democracy and a free market.”

Later, a mom told the board she supported banning classroom discussions of “gender fluidity” because, she said, when her child started identifying as a girl, Grapevine-Colleyville teachers provided the student with information affirming that gender expression. As a result, the mother said, choking up as a beeper signaled that her time had expired, “I lost my son.”

Nobody from Patriot Mobile spoke at the meeting. In a recent talk radio interview, Wambsganss said she and her team were busy mapping out their plans for replicating what they achieved in districts like Grapevine-Colleyville in communities across Texas.

A majority of those who did comment during Monday’s meeting said they opposed the policy changes, including one father who accused Grapevine-Colleyville board members of being beholden to Patriot Mobile. “The result,” he said, “is our kids are being forced to act as pawns in their political game.”

A high school student who identified as LGBTQ told the board she feared that the new policy would make queer students — who are four times as likely to contemplate suicide — feel even more alienated. “Help my friends,” she said. “Don’t tell them that they should be erased.”

One mother, a former teacher, turned to scripture to explain her opposition to the school district’s new direction under Patriot Mobile’s influence. She said she was worried about LGBTQ students and children from other marginalized groups.

Paraphrasing Jesus, she said, “They will know us by our love.”

“When I read about the policies and I watch and attend school board meetings,” the woman said, “I keep thinking, ‘This is not love.’”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...-took-four-texas-school-boards-rcna44583


This one could go in the dark money or Christian Nationalism threads. These people are pushing their faith in their school on those kids and parents against their will.

JC

I'm not picking my mobile carrier on Political, religious, social values, as I suspect most people. Never even heard of Patriot Mobile.

Looked them up, they have 33 employees with annual revenue of under 7 million, and they use Sprints towers.

Seems anyone can start a cell phone company these days.

True. Even Ryan Reynolds has one. Mint Mobile. But then of course I don't think he's trying to control school boards.

You misspelled Koch brothers but I’m actually more okay with your spelling.

No, but they make it even. Politics have long ago let ethics go to the wayside.

I don’t think it makes it even. You have two special interests competing against each other where the masses are getting screwed. It’s the most asymmetrical aspect of American politics as it stands.